Business-driven IT for SAP - The Model Information Flow Guillaume Belrose, Klaus Brand, Nigel Edwards, Sven Graupner, Jerry Rolia, Lawrence Wilcock Enterprise Systems and Software Laboratory HP Laboratories Palo Alto HPL-2007-143 August 23, 2007* business-driven IT, SAP, automated management, ITIL, ITSM, SOA Enterprises rely on efficient and flexible IT services. While complexity of services is increasing, personnel to provide and manage services will remain limited. At the same time, IT environments are becoming more dynamic, from the business side as well as from the infrastructure side. The ability to incorporate change faster, more efficiently and reliably has become a measure of quality of enterprise IT organizations. IT responds to these challenges by decoupling functions into services and by improving the linkages between business processes and the supporting IT systems. Service-oriented Architecture has become the accepted pattern for modern enterprise IT. This paper presents the Model Information Flow. It is part of a collaboration between HP Labs and SAP Research. The goal of the collaboration is to explore new approaches of model-driven planning, design and management of enterprise applications in a shared and virtualized IT infrastructure. The goal is to substantially improve the linkage between the business and the IT layer and the ability to manage and accommodate change more efficiently and in a largely automated manner. * Internal Accession Date Only Published in BDIM 2007, 21 May 2007, Munich, Germany Approved for External Publication © Copyright 2007 IEEE